Showing titles in Historical

Born and raised in Essex, Maajid Nawaz was recruited into politicised Islam as a teenager. Abandoning his love of hip-hop music, graffiti and girls, he was recruited into Hizb ut-Tahrir (the Liberation Party), where he played a leading and international role in the shaping and dissemination of an aggressive anti-West narrative. While studying for his Arabic and law degree, he travelled around the UK and to Denmark and Pakistan, setting up new cells.

Benjamin Franklin is the founding father who winks at us - an ambitious urban entrepreneur who rose up the social ladder, from leather-aproned shopkeeper to dining with kings. In best-selling author Walter Isaacson's vivid and witty full-scale biography, we discover why Franklin turns to us from history's stage with eyes that twinkle from behind his new-fangled spectacles. In Benjamin Franklin, Isaacson shows how Franklin defines both his own time and ours. The most interesting thing that Franklin invented, and continually reinvented, was himself.

"If there is any life that is happier than the life we led on our timber ranch, it must be the sort of life which I have not read of in books or experienced in person," wrote Mark Twain, and now you can share in that experience. The beloved American humorist spent seven years on a "pleasure trip" through the untamed wilderness of Nevada. Twain intended to spend three months touring silver mines, but the lure of rough terrain and comfortable clothes proved irresistible - as will this vibrant travelogue.

Born to the ranks of the lower English gentry in 1775, Jane Austen led what some have mistakenly described as an ordinary and unremarkable life - a life that ended all too soon at the age of 41. But from this life, Austen drew inspiration for six novels that all rank as literary masterpieces, including the widely beloved Pride and Prejudice. So, what do we really know about Austen’s life and influences?

Drawing from a vast range of original archival documents across India and abroad, this biography in two parts - the first focusing on the years leading up to his incarceration and eventual release from the Kalapani - puts Savarkar, his life, and his philosophy in a new perspective and looks at the man with all his achievements and failings.

Chris Hunter has the most dangerous job in the world in the most dangerous place in the world: he's responsible for bomb disposal in the British sector of Iraq, pitted against some of the most ruthless and technically advanced terrorists in the world. It is a 24/7 job; his team defused over 45 bombs in the first two months alone. And the people they're up against don't play by the Geneva Convention. For them, there are no rules, only results.

In this entertaining and engaging memoir, former ambassador Sherard Cowper-Coles lifts the lid on embassy life throughout the world. For over 30 years Sherard Cowper-Coles was on the diplomatic front line in a distinguished Foreign Office career that took him from the corridors of power in Whitehall to a string of high-profile posts across the globe.

A definitive new edition of a classic memoir, published in association with the RAF Museum. Guy Gibson was the leader of the famous Dambusters raid and Enemy Coast Ahead is a vivid, honest account, widely regarded as one of the best books on World War II. It is also an insider's account that sets down in clear, honest detail the challenges that the RAF faced in the war against Germany's Luftwaffe.

Napoleon Bonaparte lived one of the most extraordinary of all human lives. In the space of just 20 years, from October 1795, when as a young artillery captain he cleared the streets of Paris of insurrectionists, to his final defeat at the (horribly mismanaged) battle of Waterloo in June 1815, Napoleon transformed France and Europe. After seizing power in a coup d'état, he ended the corruption and incompetence into which the revolution had descended.

Alexander the Great’s story often reads like fiction: son to a snake-loving mother and a battle-scarred father, tutored by Aristotle, a youth from the periphery of the Greek world who took part in his first campaign aged 16, becoming king of Macedon at 20 and king of Asia by 25, leading his armies into battle like a Homeric figure. Each generation has peered through the glass of history and come to their own conclusion about Alexander, be it enlightened ruler, military genius, megalomaniac, drunkard or despot. Yet the first two decades of his life have until now been a mystery.

The Brandenburgers were Hitler's Special Forces, a band of mainly foreign German nationals who used disguise and fluency in other languages to complete daring missions into enemy territory. Overshadowed by stories of their Allied equivalents, their history has largely been ignored. First published in 1984, de Giampietro's highly-personal and eloquent memoir is a vivid account of his experiences. In astonishing detail, he delves into the reality of life in the unit from everyday concerns and politics to training and involvement in Brandenburg missions.

In 1942 the young soldier Arthur Dodd was taken prisoner by the German Army and transported to Oswiecim in Polish Upper Silesia. The Germans gave it another name, now synonymous with mankind’s darkest hours. They called it Auschwitz. Forced to do hard labour, starved and savagely beaten, Arthur thought his life would end in Auschwitz. Determined to go down fighting, he sabotaged Nazi industrial work, risked his life to alleviate the suffering of the Jewish prisoners and aided a partisan group planning a mass breakout.

The secrets of Queen Victoria's sixth child, Princess Louise, may be destined to remain hidden forever. What was so dangerous about this artistic, tempestuous royal that her life has been documented more by rumor and gossip than hard facts? When Lucinda Hawksley started to investigate, often thwarted by inexplicable secrecy, she discovered a fascinating woman, modern before her time, whose story has been shielded for years from public view.

In this gripping memoir by the chief American interpreter at the Nuremberg trials, Richard Sonnenfeldt recounts a remarkable life. By age 22 he had fought in the Battle of the Bulge and helped liberate the Dachau concentration camp, when he was appointed chief interpreter for the American prosecution of Nazi war criminals at the Nuremberg trials.

During his service, he spent pretrial time with Hermann Göering as well as other top Nazi leaders.

In the best-selling tradition of Truman, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer David Herbert Donald offers a new classic in American history and biography - a masterly account of how one man's extraordinary political acumen steered the Union to victory in the Civil War, and of how his soaring rhetoric gave meaning to that agonizing struggle for nationhood and equality.

This riveting narrative explores the lives of six remarkable female pharaohs, from Hatshepsut to Cleopatra - women who ruled with real power - and shines a piercing light on our own perceptions of women in power today. Female rulers are a rare phenomenon - but thousands of years ago in ancient Egypt, women reigned supreme. But throughout human history, women in positions of power were more often used as political pawns in a male-dominated society. What was so special about ancient Egypt that provided women this kind of access to the highest political office?

On Tuesday, September 11, 2001, Michael Benfante went to work, just like he had day after day, at his office on 81st floor in the World Trade Center North Tower. Moments after the first plane struck, just 12 floors above him, Benfante organized his terrified employees, getting them out of the office and moving down the stairwells. On his way down, he and another co-worker encountered a woman in a wheelchair on the 68th floor.

Before Adolf Hitler's rise to power in Germany, there was 1924. This was the year of Hitler's final transformation into the self-proclaimed savior and infallible leader who would interpret and distort Germany's historical traditions to support his vision for the Third Reich. Everything that would come - the rallies and riots, the single-minded deployment of a catastrophically evil idea - all of it crystallized in one defining year.

Paramahansa Yogananda was one of those great spiritual teachers in India who introduced the ancient wisdom of Kriya yoga, to the western world. His book Autobiography of a Yogi, which was first published in 1946, has been regarded as a spiritual classic, inspiring numerous seekers around the world.

Paris, 1940. A woman in a red hat and a black fur coat hurries down a side-street. She is Mathilde Carré, codenamed 'the cat', known as Agent Victoire. She is a charismatic spy; her story is one of resistance and survival. These are the darkest days for France, half occupied by Nazi Germany, half run by the collaborationist Vichy regime; and dark days for Britain - isolated and under threat of invasion.